Looking at all the pictures of old houses on the Appalachian Memory Keepers site made me think about the idea of home and what the word means to different people. It might mean a house, a trailer, a condo, an apartment, or any place of residence. To a college student or a person in a nursing room it might mean a room. In other words, there are many definitions of home and many different thoughts about what it is.
It may be a place where your family lives, where you retreat to daily from work to have a home-cooked meal, watch a little television, play with your pets, and read stories to your babies as you tuck them into bed.
It may also be a sanctuary or a retreat in which you are totally comfortable in your jammies away from the outside world, a place of rest and quiet where you can dream dreams and plan your future.
Home may also be a place of rest where you come to relax, to read, to think, to talk to your friends, to read the posts on Facebook, play Scrabble online, or draw or paint.
Home may be a childhood memory of time spent with your parents and grandparents in a place that is now neglected and perhaps falling down if it is still standing at all. It is there where you remember climbing trees, working in the garden, playing in the woods, helping your mom with household chores, practicing your piano lessons, and making a Chef-Boy-R-Dee pizza. From home you went to school and to church and sometimes out to a restaurant; you were allowed to walk to the library and the theatre, and where you grew up and ultimately left to live on your own.
As one who studies family history, there are many homes that I remember with absolute love and affection—my grandparents’, aunts and uncles’, parents’, and my cousins’. Home is the spot that your mind’s eye goes to more and more the older you get, as I am now. It is much larger than a place on the map; it is a place in your heart that is ever with you; it is the land and the space that you love as much as anything on earth because it is there that you began your journey.
Home is likely the best place on earth.